Microsoft (MSFT) Changing 'Productivity Score' Tool - Investopedia

Microsoft Corporation (MSFT) has announced that it will make a key change to the Microsoft Productivity Score feature that comes with its Microsoft 365 applications suite. Microsoft asserts that the Productivity Score is designed to be "a tool that helps organizations measure and manage the adoption of Microsoft 365." However, privacy advocates having been criticizing it as a "full-fledged workplace surveillance tool."   

In response to those critiques, Microsoft has announced that it is removing the ability for managers to view the activity of individual employees. Instead, they are "modifying the user interface to make it clearer that Productivity Score is a measure of organizational adoption of technology – and not individual user behavior." Microsoft goes on to state that this feature "was never designed to score individual users."

• The Microsoft 365 Productivity Score has been criticized as an employee surveillance tool.
• Microsoft responds that its real intent is to assess organizational effectiveness, not individual employee behavior.
• However, Microsoft is modifying the tool so that managers only see organization-wide scores.
• The growth of remote work amid COVID-19 has increased companies' desire to monitor employees more closely.

What Is the Microsoft Productivity Score?

According to Microsoft, the Productivity Score is designed to "help you identify opportunities to improve productivity and satisfaction in your organization," while also offering "recommended actions you can take to help your organization use Microsoft 365 products efficiently." A key theoretic underpinning of the score is a report from Forrester Research that found "when people collaborate and share content in the cloud (instead of emailing attachments), they can save up to 100 minutes a week." 

The Productivity Score assesses how an "organization is using Microsoft 365 in its journey towards digital transformation." It looks at eight categories of activity, giving a maximum score of 100 for each, and thus a top score of 800 in total. These categories are: communication, meetings, content collaboration, teamwork, mobility, endpoint analytics, network connectivity, and Microsoft 365 Apps Health ("whether the devices in your organization are running Microsoft 365 apps on recommended channels"). Data is collected from Exchange, SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Yammer, and Skype.

Significance for Investors

The Microsoft press release states that "the shift to remote work this year has brought new challenges and stresses to employees across the world."  This appears to be an indirect acknowledgment that companies see a growing need to monitor the increased ranks of remote workers.

The swift response of Microsoft to these concerns may cause the controversy to abate and thus limit any potential public relations or political damage to the company. On the other hand, recent patent filings indicate that "Microsoft has been exploring additional ideas to monitor workers in the interest of organizational productivity."

Putting these controversies aside, the Productivity Score tool holds the potential of making Microsoft products even more embedded in its enterprise customers by convincing these customers of the productivity enhancements that these products are delivering or promising to deliver as a result of increased utilization. Meanwhile, Microsoft has established itself as a leader in collaboration software with its Teams product, which comes as a free application included with Microsoft 365 and Office 365, and a virtuous circle for the company is that the expanded use of cloud-based solutions such as Teams increases the utilization of and revenues from its own cloud computing services.

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December 04, 2020 at 10:49PM
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Microsoft (MSFT) Changing 'Productivity Score' Tool - Investopedia
"score" - Google News
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